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TIL you could make xkcd-like plots with matplotlib

by bobsacamano19 on 11/20/23, 6:10 AM with 17 comments

• by rented_mule on 11/20/23, 7:51 AM

  I've used this for documenting concepts where I don't want people getting bogged down in trying to glean precise relationships from the plots, just general ideas. People have also commented that it made some deeply technical documentation more approachable because it felt less formal.

• by angry_moose on 11/20/23, 6:47 AM

  Fun plot style, but the "noise" is too regular to really look right. Seems like like it basically just superimposes a sine wave onto all the straight lines.

  Compare the axes of the plots, or the vertical lines on the bar chart which have a pretty distinct periodicity, to the original: https://xkcd.com/373/

• by robbomacrae on 11/20/23, 6:50 AM

  Shameless plug but this is exactly how I put together the graphs in my blog post[0]. It's very easy to use and surprisingly versatile although I did add a bit of photoshopping to get things exactly as I wanted them.

  [0] https://summer.ai/blog ChatGPT should be your first cofounder

• by cmcaleer on 11/20/23, 7:32 AM

  While I'm not a fan of the plot style, I use the xkcd colors from matplotlib.colors.XKCD_COLORS all the time. 954 colors named from the xkcd color survey [0].

  [0] https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/

• by asicsp on 11/20/23, 6:46 AM

  Related:

  Xkcd-Style Plots in Matplotlib https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-i... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19293129)

  XKCD Plots in Matplotlib: Going the Whole Way https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/07/10/XKCD-plots-in-matp... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11642344)

• by mbreese on 11/20/23, 6:43 AM

  There is also an R package to do the same thing as a ggplot theme: https://xkcd.r-forge.r-project.org/

• by kristopolous on 11/20/23, 6:36 AM

  is that how he does it? I wouldn't be surprised.

• by rekttrader on 11/20/23, 6:34 AM

  import antigravity